History

Amazon Heart was founded in 2004 by two young breast cancer survivors,
Megan Dwyer and Meredith Campbell.

Our adventure events were created to provide a unique and inspiring peer support
opportunity for under-served groups of breast cancer survivors, particularly the young.
These events themselves create a broader social impact for women with breast cancer
by funding projects that fill other needs, creating advocacy and awareness around
breast cancer issues, and also provide volunteers and funding for local community social
action projects.

Mission
Amazon Heart transforms the lives of women living with breast cancer through adventure events that in themselves create a wider social impact in their local communities.

Vision
By 2010 Amazon Heart will provide adventure programs and social impact initiatives for women living with breast cancer in the United States of America, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Values
Community
is the most powerful agent of social change. The impact of one multiplied by many makes all things possible. Communities empower individuals to change their own lives for the better, and to reach their full potential by engaging with and supporting others.

Empowerment
gives people access to the skills and resources necessary to achieve their dreams. We encourage and inspire people to address their individual concerns and move towards making a difference for others.

Social Impact
is our reason for existing. We address unmet social needs and provide the catalyst for sustainable, systemic change by empowering others.

Living Life Fully
by following our passions at work and in life. Life is not a rehearsal. We advocate making the most of every day and finding balance, joy and fun in all we do.

Humanism
is treating everyone with respect and honoring the individual gifts they bring to the world. We believe in diversity, equity, unity and inclusion.

Operational Principles
Research
Every aspect of Amazon Heart is based on research identifying the specific needs and concerns of women with breast cancer (particularly the young), the most appropriate solutions, and the gaps in existing services and programs.

Integration and Partnership
Amazon Heart is envisaged and positioned as an integrated part of a spectrum of support programs and interventions for women with breast cancer.

Partnerships will be actively sought with other organizations that are aligned with our objectives and complementary in their range of services.

Grow
Amazon Heart will grow the overall level of response to women with breast cancer by directing a stream of revenue towards non-profit organizations with similar aims.

Our business ventures and events will contribute a percentage of profits to key partner organizations. Additional benefits to these organizations include: associated fundraising programs, high profile media activities, and increased membership, visibility and impact.

Founders
Amazon Heart was founded by two young women diagnosed with breast cancer in their early thirties: Meredith Campbell and Megan Dwyer.

Meredith Campbell, BA, CFRE - Director
Meredith Campbell was a 33 year-old champion sailor, internationally recognized charity marketing professional and mother of one when diagnosed with breast cancer in 2000. Over the next 10 months, she battled not only the mental and physical effects of surgery, two rounds of chemotherapy plus radiation treatment, but also continued sailing, working and traveling the globe.

For 13 years, Meredith has been a leading professional in marketing and fundraising in the non-profit sector in Australia, and an internationally recognized expert in the field of corporate sponsorship.

In addition to her marketing expertise, Meredith has extensive experience in the establishment of innovative, community based social change programs, including the use of emerging technologies such as the internet to establish world first web-based counseling programs.

Meredith brings her unique experience in counseling and coping strategies through the non-profit organizations she has worked with throughout her career to Amazon Heart.

Her work at the Queensland Cancer Fund gave her extensive exposure to issues related to counseling and dealing with cancer. This exposure was further expanded at Kids Help Line, Australia's largest counseling service for children, and a world pioneer in the use of the Internet and email for counseling support.

Megan Dwyer, P.E. - Director
In June 2002, just weeks after launching a new career as a real estate agent, Megan Dwyer was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 35.

Prior to her diagnosis, Megan had combined successful careers in structural engineering, marketing, business and life coaching with amateur competition in water polo and triathlons. Her background as an athlete and in coaching was invaluable in plotting a course through surgery and four months of chemotherapy.

Megan is a graduate of the National Breast Cancer Coalition's Project LEAD training for breast cancer advocates, volunteers as a peer support counselor for the Y-ME National Breast Cancer Hotline, serves on the board of advisors and as a mentor to the Young Survival Coalition Point of Contact program, represents Amazon Heart as a board member organization of the California Breast Cancer Organizations, and is an NBCC 2006 Team Lead.

Megan brings to Amazon Heart her incredible passion for empowering women and her commitment to cause positive change in the world.

The Need
Statistics from the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute show:

• Currently, a woman living in the US has a 12.3% (1 in 8) lifetime risk of developing breast cancer. In the 1970s, the lifetime risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer
  was 1 in 11.
• Another woman is diagnosed every three minutes.
• An estimated 2.4 million women are living with breast cancer in the United States today.
• In 2007, it is estimated that 240,510 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer in the U.S.

Young women are also affected by breast cancer, and experience unique needs and concerns related to their life stage*:

• There are approximately 250,000 women in the United States under age of 40 living with breast cancer. In 2007, more than 23,790 women under the age of 45 were diagnosed with the disease.
• Young women with breast cancer experience greater unmet needs, more unhappiness and more financial stress than older women.
• Young women with breast cancer experience a high degree of social isolation through feeling "different" to their peers, and the unlikelihood of knowing any other women in their situation.
• Young women report that they are adversely impacted by negative and/or unrealistic portrayals of women with breast cancer in the media.

Peer Support
Women see Peer Support programs as one of the most important interventions available to them:

• The key aspect of the peer support process is the bond of common experience leading to a decrease in social isolation, an increase in optimism about the future, and reassurance about personal reactions and femininity.
• Peer support is most effective when positioned as part of a suite of interventions.
• Peer support programs are often generated by women living with breast cancer themselves, and are community based. Once initiated, these grass roots programs become highly visible and achieve rates of use that many professionally driven programs fail to achieve.
• 
  Key considerations in designing and operating peer support programs for women with breast cancer are:
• Matching people at similar stages of their disease, by age, lifestyle, interests and stage of illness and recovery
• Support when a member of the peer support community gets sick or dies
• Confidentiality
• Referral to other services when in emotional crisis
• It is not a substitute for psychotherapy
• Young women in particular say that peer support is their preferred and most successful intervention.
• There is no documented online, one-to-one peer support program for women of any age with breast cancer anywhere in the world.
• Trials of online group peer support shown that they are as effective as face-to-face, and even more so for women from underserved populations.
• Existing face-to-face, one-to-one peer support programs are aimed at intervention at the time of diagnosis and not at the stage of negotiating a future life after treatment ends.
• Existing face-to-face group support programs are structured around set topics which inhibit relationship building at a social level and do not allow women to address what they need to, when they need to.
• Because young women with breast cancer are so widely dispersed, face-to-face peer support is difficult to achieve, particularly when matching by age, interests, lifestyle and stage of illness and recovery.

Information and Education
Young women believe that the medical profession needs more education and information about their specific needs and concerns. In particular, many young women report frustration over a perceived lack of understanding in the medical community about their unique experience of breast cancer.

Advocacy and Media
Young women living with breast cancer advocate positive media portrayals of young women with breast cancer as normal:

• Young women want positive examples of life after breast cancer.
• The media can play a positive role in helping young women feel less isolated and alone in their experience.

* Sources

Structure
Amazon Heart is an international movement that operates globally through incorporated Amazon Heart non-profit organisations in the US and UK, and partnerships with other breast cancer organisations in other countries.

- Megan Dwyer, Amazon Heart Co-Founder

The Amazon warriors of Greek legend were renowned as strong and independent fighters, famed for removing one breast to improve the accuracy of their archers. Our name, Amazon Heart, reflects the challenge women face in incorporating the emotional vulnerability and fragility brought by a diagnosis of cancer, with a strong and independent outlook on life.

Little Art
Little Art, as our Amazon Heart logo is affectionately known, was named for Queen Artemisia of Persia. The following excerpt is from "Uppity Women of Ancient Times" by Vicki Leon:

In the 480 BC war fought near Athens between the Greeks and the Persians, few on the losing Persian side came out looking good. The exception was one heroic woman, Artemisia by name, the queen of Caria. Daughter of a Cretan woman and a Carian king, Artemisia had capably run the country from her capital city of Halicarnassus ever since her father died. Caria (in southern Turkey) being at that time in the Persian political sphere, Artemisia was asked to cough up for the war effort that King Xerxes was mounting against the Greeks. Artemisia did him one better: She showed up in full battle armour with five of her own triple-decked war-ships and a land army to boot. She had a grown son of her own she could have sent, but evidently adventurous Art wouldn't have missed this opportunity for the world.

Round one was a naval battle off the Greek island of Euboea. Artemisia fought bravely, but the Persians took a licking. Xerxes asked her for a little Monday-morning quarterbacking, and she told him frankly that the Greeks had superiority on the sea. The king, however, chose to believe that the Persians lost because he hadn't been there to see the troops. For the second big dustup, to take place in the narrow channel between Salamis and the island of Aegina, Xerxes had confidently set up a sand chair on a cliff overlooking the water.

From her bold actions in the earlier battle, Artemisia already had a bounty price on her head from the Greeks: 10,000 drachmas for anyone who could take her alive. Right away, the Persian side had problems. Their huge fleet, too much of a good thing, couldn't maneuver or fight. Chaos reigned. The queen, chased by a greek ship, coolly rammed and sank an ally's vessel, confusing both sides enough to let her get away. Persian losses mounted. With a sigh, Xerxes folded up his sand chair.

Postbattle, Xerxes awarded Artemisia with a suit of Greek armor ("It's perfect - I don't have anything like this in my closet"), and our assertive woman reawarded him with another bit of tactical advice for the rest of the war. It happened to coincide with Xerxes' ideas so he thought her cleverer than ever. These days, attorneys for NOW would have Xerxes in a headlock for his comments about Artemisia, but his fond remarks passed for compliments back thn and were quoted for centuries: "My men fight like women, my women fight like men!"

Sources*

Published Research Papers:

"The Psychosocial Needs of Breast Cancer Survivors; A Qualitative Study of the Shared and Unique Needs of Younger Versus Older Survivors", Thewes, Butow, Girgis and Pendlebury, Psycho-Oncology, 13: 177 189, 2004.

"Then and Now: Quality of Life of Young Breast Cancer Survivors", Bloom, Stewart, Chang and Banks, Psycho-Oncology, 13: 147 160, 2004.

"Clinical Practice Guidelines for the Management and Support of Younger Women with Breast Cancer", National Breast Cancer Centre, Australia, 2004.

"Evaluation of an Internet Support Group for Women with Primary Breast Cancer", Winzelberg et al, Cancer, Volume 97, Issue 5, 2003. Pages 1164 1173.

"A Review of Peer Support in the Context of Cancer", Dunn and Steginga et al, Journal of Psychosocial Oncology, Vol. 21 (2) 2003.

"The Young Women's Network: A Case Study in Community Development", Steginga and Dunn, J. Community Appl. Soc. Psychology, 11: 381 388 (2001).

"Young Women's Experience of Breast Cancer: Defining Young and Identifying Concerns", Dunn and Steginga, Psycho-Oncology 9: 137 146, 2000.

"Evaluation of Peer Support Program for Women with Breast Cancer Lessons for Practitioners", Sunn, Steginga et al, J. Community App. Soc. Psychology. 9: 13 22 (1999).